Last month, Meenu Batra, 53, who has lived in the South Texas border colonia of Laguna Heights since 2002, was on her way to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to work another case. She’s been a court interpreter for over 20 years, the only one licensed in Texas for Hindi, Punjabi, or Urdu. Her language skills are requested nationwide, where she’s contracted to help people making their way through the immigration court system, just as she did for herself 35 years ago when she immigrated from India to New Jersey before settling in Texas.
She planned to meet with her adult children in Austin after the Wisconsin trip, the only difference she foresaw in an otherwise typical trip. Her routine for years included flying from either Harlingen or Brownsville to far-flung parts of the country where South Asian immigrants needed language access. For this trip, the flight was out of Harlingen.
But, around 5 p.m. on March 17, Batra was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents after passing through security at Harlingen International Airport. In a sworn deposition that was filed as part of a petition for habeas corpus—a legal request to be released on the grounds that the detention is unlawful—Batra said the people who arrested her did not have visible badges nor were they wearing uniforms. One of those agents had asked Batra if she knew she was in the country illegally and that she had a deportation order. She replied that her work authorization status, which she applied for regularly after being granted a legal status called withholding of removal by a New Jersey immigration judge decades ago, was good for another four years.
“That doesn’t mean you can be here forever,” the agent replied. Two more plainclothes agents would join the two that detained her, bringing her down the escalator and to the front of the airport.
“Having watched and read enough news, I know that the moment you say something, they accuse you of evading arrest or whatever other things,” Batra told the Texas Observer. “So, being mindful of all that, mindful of the whole line and being embarrassed in front of everybody, I just complied.”
Batra’s attorneys say the agents were targeting her. “This is someone who maybe had one speeding ticket in the last 30 years and [is] being treated like a notorious criminal,” Deepak Ahluwalia, a California and Texas-based immigration attorney representing Batra, told the Observer.
